The Day The Music Died
On February 3, 1959, American rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and "The Big Bopper" J. P. Richardson were killed in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa, together with pilot Roger Peterson. The event later became known as "The Day the Music Died", after singer-songwriter Don McLean referred to it as such in his 1971 song "American Pie". At the time, Holly and his band, consisting of Waylon Jennings, Tommy Allsup, and Carl Bunch, were playing on the "Winter Dance Party" tour across the Midwest. Rising artists Valens, Richardson and Dion and the Belmonts had joined the tour as well. The long journeys between venues on board the cold, uncomfortable tour buses adversely affected the performers, with cases of flu and even frostbite. After stopping at Clear Lake to perform, and frustrated by such conditions, Holly chose to charter a plane to reach their next venue in Moorhead, Minnesota. Richardson, who had the flu, swapped places with Jennings, taking his seat on the plane, while Allsup lost his seat to Valens on a coin toss. Soon after takeoff, late at night and in poor, wintry weather conditions, the pilot lost control of the light aircraft, a Beechcraft Bonanza, which subsequently crashed into a cornfield. Everyone on board was killed. The event has since been mentioned in various songs and films. A number of monuments have been erected at the crash site and in Clear Lake, where an annual memorial concert is also held at the Surf Ballroom, the venue that hosted the artists' last performance. Buddy Holly terminated his association with the Crickets in November 1958. For the start of the "Winter Dance Party" tour, he assembled a band consisting of Waylon Jennings (bass), Tommy Allsup (guitar), and Carl Bunch (drums), with the opening vocals of Frankie Sardo. The tour was set to cover 24 Midwestern cities in as many days. New hit artist Ritchie Valens, "The Big Bopper" J. P. Richardson and Dion DiMucci and his band The Belmonts joined the tour to promote their recordings and make an extra profit. The tour began in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on January 23, 1959 and the performance at Clear Lake on February 2 was the 11th of 24 scheduled locations. The amount of travel soon became a logistical problem. The distances between venues had not been properly considered when the performances were scheduled; instead of "circling" around the Midwest to each town, the tour zig-zagged with distances between cities over 400 miles (640 km). General Artists Corporation, the organization that booked the tour, later received considerable criticism for their seemingly total disregard for the conditions they forced the touring musicians to endure. The entire company of musicians traveled together in one bus, although the buses used for the tour were wholly inadequate, breaking down and being replaced with astounding frequency. Griggs estimates that five separate buses were used in the first 11 days of the tour – "reconditioned school buses, not good enough for school kids." The artists themselves were responsible for loading and unloading equipment at each stop, as no road crew assisted them. Adding to the disarray, the buses were not equipped for the weather which consisted of waist-deep snow in several areas and varying temperatures from 20 °F (−7 °C) to as low as −36 °F (−38 °C). One bus had a heating system that broke down shortly after the tour began, in Appleton, Wisconsin. Later, Richardson and Valens began experiencing flu-like symptoms and drummer Bunch was hospitalized for severely frostbitten feet, after the tour bus simply broke down in the middle of the highway in subzero temperatures near Ironwood, Michigan. The musicians replaced that bus with another school bus and kept traveling. After Bunch was hospitalized, Carlo Mastrangelo of The Belmonts took over the drumming duties. When Dion and The Belmonts were performing, the drum seat was taken by either Valens or Holly. As Holly's group had been the backing band for all of the acts, Holly, Valens, and DiMucci took turns playing drums for each other at the performances in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Clear Lake, Iowa. On Monday, February 2, the tour arrived in Clear Lake, having driven 350 miles (560 km) from the previous day's concert in Green Bay. The town had not been a scheduled stop, but the tour promoters, hoping to fill an open date, called the manager of the local Surf Ballroom, Carroll Anderson (1920–2006), and offered him the show. He accepted, and they set the show for that night. By the time Holly arrived at the venue that evening, he was frustrated with the ongoing problems with the bus. The next scheduled destination after Clear Lake was Moorhead, Minnesota, a 365 miles (587 km) drive north and northwest (and, reflecting the poor planning, a journey that would take them directly back through two towns they had already played within the last week.) No let up after that was in sight, as the following day, they were scheduled to travel back almost directly south to Sioux City, Iowa, a 325 miles (523 km) trip. Holly decided to charter a plane to take himself and his band to Fargo, North Dakota, which is adjacent to Moorhead. The rest of the party would have picked him up in Moorhead, saving him the journey in the bus and leaving him time to get some rest. Anderson called Hubert Jerry Dwyer (1930–2016), owner of the Dwyer Flying Service, a company in Mason City, to charter the plane to fly to Hector Airport in Fargo, the closest one to Moorhead. Flight arrangements were made with Roger Peterson, a 21-year-old local pilot described as a "young married man who built his life around flying". The flying service charged a fee of $36 per passenger for the flight on the 1947 single-engined, V-tailed Beechcraft 35 Bonanza (registration N3794N), which could seat three passengers plus the pilot. A popular misconception, originating from Don McLean's eponymous song about the crash, was that the plane was called American Pie. In fact, no record exists of any name ever having been given to N3794N. The most widely accepted version of events was that Richardson had contracted flu during the tour and asked Jennings for his seat on the plane. When Holly learned that Jennings was not going to fly, he said in jest: "Well, I hope your ol' bus freezes up." Jennings responded: "Well, I hope your ol' plane crashes", a humorous but ill-fated response that haunted him for the rest of his life. Valens, who once had a fear of flying, asked Allsup for his seat on the plane. The two agreed to toss a coin to decide. Bob Hale, a disc jockey with Mason City's KRIB-AM, was working the concert that night and flipped the coin in the ballroom's side-stage room shortly before the musicians departed for the airport. Valens won the coin toss for the seat on the flight. In contradiction to the testimony of Allsup and Jennings, Dion has since said that Holly approached him along with Valens and Richardson to join the flight, not Holly's bandmates. In a 2009 interview, Dion claimed that Holly called him, Valens, and Richardson into a vacant dressing room during Sardo's performance and said "I've chartered a plane, we're the guys making the money should be the ones flying ahead...the only problem is there are only two available seats." According to Dion, it was Valens, not Richardson, who had fallen ill, so Valens and Dion flipped a coin for the seat. In his interview, no mention is made of Jennings or Allsup being invited on the plane. Dion claims that he won the toss, but ultimately decided that since the $36 fare (equivalent to $320 in 2019) equaled the monthly rent his parents paid for his childhood apartment, he could not justify the indulgence. After the show ended, Anderson drove Holly, Valens, and Richardson to the Mason City Municipal Airport. The weather at the time of departure was reported as light snow, a ceiling of 3,000 feet (900 m) AMSL with sky obscured, visibility 6 miles (10 km), and winds from 20 to 30 mph (32 to 48 km/h). Although deteriorating weather was reported along the planned route, the weather briefings Peterson received failed to relay the information. The plane took off normally from runway 17 (today's runway 18) at 12:55 am Central Time on Tuesday, February 2. Dwyer witnessed the take-off from a platform outside the control tower. He was able to see clearly the aircraft's tail light for most of the brief flight, which started with an initial left turn onto a northwesterly heading and a climb to 800 feet (240 m). The tail light was then observed gradually descending until it disappeared out of view. Around 1:00 am, when Peterson failed to make the expected radio contact, repeated attempts to establish communication were made, at Dwyer's request, by the radio operator, but they were all unsuccessful. Later that morning, Dwyer, having heard no word from Peterson since his departure, took off in another airplane to retrace his planned route. Within minutes, at around 9:35 am, he spotted the wreckage less than 6 mi (10 km) northwest of the airport The sheriff's office, alerted by Dwyer, dispatched Deputy Bill McGill, who drove to the crash site, a cornfield belonging to Albert Juhl. The Bonanza had impacted terrain at high speed, estimated to have been around 170 mph (270 km/h), banked steeply to the right and in a nose-down attitude. The right wing tip had struck the ground first, sending the aircraft cartwheeling across the frozen field for 540 feet (160 m), before coming to rest against a wire fence at the edge of Juhl's property. The bodies of Holly and Valens had been ejected from the torn fuselage and lay near the plane's wreckage. Richardson's body had been thrown over the fence and into the cornfield of Juhl's neighbor Oscar Moffett, while Peterson's body was entangled in the wreckage. With the rest of the entourage en route to Minnesota, Anderson, who had driven the party to the airport and witnessed the plane's takeoff, had to identify the bodies of the musicians. County coroner Ralph Smiley certified that all four victims died instantly, citing the cause of death as "gross trauma to brain" for the three artists and "brain damage" for the pilot. Holly's pregnant wife, María Elena, learned of his death via a television news report. A widow after only six months of marriage, she suffered a miscarriage shortly after, reportedly due to "psychological trauma". Holly's mother, on hearing the news on the radio at home in Lubbock, Texas, screamed and collapsed. Following the miscarriage suffered by Holly's wife and the circumstances in which she was informed of his death, a policy was later adopted by authorities not to disclose victims' names until after their families have been informed. Despite the tragedy, the "Winter Dance Party" tour did not stop. Fifteen year old Bobby Vee was given the task of filling in for Holly at the next scheduled performance in Moorhead, in part because he "knew all the words to all the songs". Jennings and Allsup carried on for two more weeks, with Jennings taking Holly's place as lead singer. Meanwhile, funerals for the victims were held individually. Holly and Richardson were buried in Texas, Valens in California, and Peterson in Iowa. A memorial service for Peterson was held at Redeemer Lutheran Church in Ventura, Iowa, on February 5. A funeral was held the next day at St. Paul Lutheran Church in his hometown of Alta; Peterson was buried in Buena Vista Memorial Cemetery in nearby Storm Lake. Holly's widow, María Elena, did not attend the funeral and has reportedly never visited his gravesite. She later said in an interview: "In a way, I blame myself. I was not feeling well when he left. I was two weeks pregnant, and I wanted Buddy to stay with me, but he had scheduled that tour. It was the only time I wasn't with him. And I blame myself because I know that, if only I had gone along, Buddy never would have gotten into that airplane." The official investigation was carried out by the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB, precursor to the NTSB). It emerged that Peterson had over four years of flying experience, of which one was with Dwyer Flying Service, and had accumulated 711 flying hours, of which 128 were on Bonanzas. He had also logged 52 hours of instrument flight training, although he had passed only his written examination, and was not yet qualified to operate in weather that required flying solely by reference to instruments. He and Dwyer Flying Service itself were certified to operate only under visual flight rules, which essentially require that the pilot must be able to see where he is going. However, on the night of the accident, visual flight would have been virtually impossible due to the low clouds, the lack of a visible horizon, and the absence of ground lights over the sparsely populated area. Furthermore, Peterson, who had failed an instrument checkride nine months before the accident, had received his instrument training on airplanes equipped with a conventional artificial horizon as a source of aircraft attitude information, while N3794N was equipped with an older-type Sperry F3 attitude gyroscope. Crucially, the two types of instruments display the same aircraft pitch attitude information in graphically opposite ways. The CAB concluded that the probable cause of the accident was "the pilot's unwise decision to embark on a flight" that required instrument flying skills he had not proved to have. A contributing factor was Peterson's unfamiliarity with the old-style attitude gyroscope fitted on board the aircraft, which may have caused him to believe that he was climbing when he was in fact descending (an example of spatial disorientation). Another contributing factor was the "seriously inadequate" weather briefing provided to Peterson, which "failed to even mention adverse flying conditions which should have been highlighted". In June 1988, a 4-foot (1.2 m) tall granite memorial bearing the names of Peterson and the three entertainers was dedicated outside the Surf Ballroom with Peterson's widow, parents, and sister in attendance; the event marked the first time that the families of Holly, Richardson, Valens, and Peterson had gathered together. In 1989, Ken Paquette, a Wisconsin fan of the 1950s era, made a stainless-steel monument that depicts a guitar and a set of three records bearing the names of the three performers killed in the accident. The monument is on private farmland, about 1⁄4 mi (400 m) west of the intersection of 315th Street and Gull Avenue, 5 mi (8 km) north of Clear Lake. Paquette also created a similar stainless-steel monument to the three musicians located outside the Riverside Ballroom in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where Holly, Richardson, and Valens played their second-to-last show on the night of February 1, 1959. This second memorial was unveiled on July 17, 2003. In February 2009, a further memorial made by Paquette for Peterson was unveiled at the crash site. A large plasma-cut steel set of Wayfarer-style glasses similar to those Holly wore sits at the access point to the crash site.